7 Ways to Harness Team Spirit During Difficult Times
Team spirit has always been considered an important part of any successful company. Various team building activities can significantly improve the way employees interact and boost morale. They can also improve how different departments in your business act together. But to get these teamwork skills, you will first have to start with some team building exercises that will allow your employees to develop the necessary qualities. Here is how to build and maintain team spirit during a national pandemic.
1. Define Your Strategy
The first thing you need to do is define your strategy. This will help you understand which direction you will be moving in to build team spirit in your company. If you don’t sort out your priorities and set achievable goals for yourself and your teammates, you won’t be able to organise the process of team building to make it result in success.
Here are some tips on how you can define your strategy:
- Make a list of all the goals and objectives you are pursuing. Analyse the list and consider combining some of your goals into bigger and more general aims.
- Think about what matters to you the most (e.g. quality of work, teamwork, morale). These are your priorities.
- Now, put your aims and priorities together. This will help you better understand in which direction you should be working. You will also realise what means you should use to achieve your goals.
2. Use Helpful Tools
The next thing you should definitely incorporate into your team building strategy is the use of helpful tools. There are so many free and paid apps and programs available for anyone to use! It would be a counterintuitive move to ditch them altogether.
Here are some tips on how to find the best tools for improving team spirit:
- Find a good messaging platform to improve communication within your team. Good communication leads to better understanding between your teammates and less information loss. Moreover, good communication can help avert conflict and misunderstandings that can lead to a loss of morale.
- Choose a good calendar or planning tool that can be used by a group of people at one time. This will help your teammates coordinate their actions better while working from home.
- Use other helpful tools to automate various tasks. You can use grammar and spelling checkers, email automation tools, and other similar apps that will make your work easier.
Related reading: For even more useful content on team building, check out our ultimate guide on Team Building Skills.
3. Host Virtual Sessions
When it comes to building teamwork in your company, one of the best things you can do is start hosting virtual sessions. These sessions will not only educate your employees they can also help harness team cohesion. Because everyone is at home, it is impossible to meet for an actual conference or learning session. So, virtual communication is your only option. Such virtual meetings can be used to help your employees better understand how to improve themselves and how to work together.
If you are not sure about the content of such sessions, you can hire a writer. This writer will create scripts or outlines for such virtual lessons that you can then use. A good place to start looking for a writer is a custom writing reviews site like ‘Pick The Writer’. There you can compare different specialists according to their experience, skills, and reputation. Alternatively, you can create your own scripts if you want to have more control over the topics you will cover.
4. Promote Competitiveness
It may seem like a strange thing to do considering the fact that you are trying to make your employees work better together but promoting competitiveness can actually help you improve teamwork in your company and lift team spirit. That being said, you should still remember that if you used incorrectly, competitiveness might make your employees too individualistic and even angry at each other.
Healthy competition, on the other hand, can significantly improve the productivity of your employees. What you can do is put them together into smaller teams that will need to compete against each other for rewards. You can also do this between different departments. This will make your employees work together in teams and achieve better results.
5. Focus on Good News
In times of a pandemic, it’s hard to see the good things when there is so much bad news constantly incoming. This is why you need to find a way to focus on the good news to lift the morale and spirit of your team. You can even hire a professional writer from a writing services reviews site like ‘Writing Judge’ who will find such news and provide you with daily reports to share with your teammates.
Yet, you should also take into account the negative aspects of these trying times. If you see that your company is experiencing hardships, introduce measures to improve the situation. Don’t ignore red flags that could potentially signal that a serious crisis is incoming.
6. Establish Good Communication
As mentioned earlier, you need to find dedicated tools that will help you with communication. But apps and programs are not the only things to keep in mind when trying to make your employees work better as a team. It’s about changing the whole mindset and teaching your teammates to work together.
Explain to them that understanding what their colleagues want is the first step to improving their team spirit and, consequently, the second step is learning how to compromise. If they don’t find a solution that everyone is comfortable with, they won’t be able to solve the problem they are working on.
7. Encourage and Reward
Last but not least, showing that you appreciate the work of your employees is crucial for maintaining good relationships in your company. You need to encourage your employees to aim higher and become better workers over time.
Once they do improve their productivity, increase sales, and make the overall performance better, you need to reward them with something they care about. This can be anything from gift cards and discounts for their favourite stores to extra vacation days. Whatever you choose should be of value to them while also being acceptable to you (after all, it’s a compromise).
Final Thoughts
To sum up, team building is important for any business. It helps you develop better understanding between your employees and helps you improve team spirit. Use the tips in this article and start implementing these exercises in your daily work routine and boost the morale of your workforce.
